1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to shipment management. More specifically, the present invention relates to using inbound receiving system.
2. Description of Related Art
There are presently a variety of ways to ship an item. The shipping vendors available to a user may include various well-known national and international vendors, such as FedEx®, United Parcel Service (UPS®), United States Postal Service (USPS®), and DHL®, as well as various local couriers. The availability of shipping services by shipping vendors may vary from location to location. For example, a local courier may only provide service within a particular city.
A shipment may also be sent using a variety of shipping options, including date and time restrictions, packaging options, recipient acknowledgement, and the like. For example, a package may need to be delivered in a padded envelope by a certain date and acknowledged by recipient signature. The availability of various shipping options may also differ from vendor to vendor. For example, a particular vendor may not offer overnight shipping, some vendors require overnight shipments to be ready for pick-up by a certain time, some vendors may have size and weight restrictions on overnight shipments, etc. In addition to size and weight restrictions, various other package specifications (e.g., shape, contents of package, value of contents) may also limit the availability of shipping options.
A shipment is typically associated with a variety of information from a variety of sources. Such information may include shipping label information, invoice information, etc., associated with multiple shipping vendors or intra-office shipments. Presently, accounting processes, such as record-keeping and account reconciliation, may often require a user to record information concerning each shipment by each shipping vendor, receive an invoice from each shipping vendor, review each invoice, compare each invoice entry against shipment records, and find matches. A user may further be asked to allocate shipping costs from multiple shipping vendors to the appropriate accounts, departments, clients, etc. In addition, a user may need to input shipping label and/or invoice information into a cost recovery or other accounting system. Managing information in such a manner may be inefficient, time-consuming, and prone to error.
Processing inbound shipments may also be time-consuming and unduly repetitive, because much of the shipping information may need to be gathered and/or entered manually into data records. For example, an incoming shipment may need to be processed individually, which may require reviewing the recipient information, determining whether such recipient information is current and/or valid, identifying a location of the recipient in the building, complex, suite, or the like, and maintaining and updating sender information into data records. Some situations may further require recording information about the sender of the package to allow for correlation among, for example, information from previous shipments, information regarding current shipments, and data that may be available from advance data feeds from the shipping vendors.
There is, therefore, a need in the art for improved systems and methods for receiving inbound shipments.